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Anita Nair
excerpt from LESSONS IN FORGETTING
Why is this happening to her? All this grace, such joy, all of life heeding her bidding, this perfect September day…
Once again Meera raises her face to the sky and smiles. Liquid sunshine melds with distilled fragrances. Top notes that tease and waltz. Apples. Jasmine. Walnuts. Roses. Musk. Wine. A solitary chrysanthemum. The plop of corks. The steady arc of the stream. Cool glass against her cheek.
In the Greek myths that Meera loves, there is a goddess who could be her. Hera, wife of Zeus, god among gods, and queen of the universe.So it is a vivacious Meera who stands in the pathway of the breeze and allows it to play games with her. A breeze that ruffles the chiffon of her skirt and raises a strand of hair and teases it across her cheek into her mouth.
Somewhere in her a little girl skips. One two buckle my shoe, three four, shut the door, five six, pick the cheese sticks, seven eight, eat them straight, nine ten let’s do it again!
Meera feels as if she can’t stop smiling. It is the most perfect September day anyone could wish for.Why, everyone else here seems to think so as well. The poolside is rapidly filling up. All these beautiful people, Meera thinks, emerging from their beautiful homes in their beautiful clothes to congregate around the softly lapping waters of the hotel pool under a blue blue sky.
She takes another sip of the white wine. It tastes sour in her mouth. Only for a moment. Then it races through her, the cold sourness plopping every single knot. Plop. Plop. Plop. With the dissolution of each knot, Meera finds another reason to smile.The hosts of the brunch, wine makers launching a new wine will be delighted at the turn out. What more could they want? The beautiful people with their heads pertly held, fingers wrapped around glass stems, striking poses as photographers foxtrot from group to group, clicking, capturing beautiful moments.
They will never allow themselves to feel absurd, these beautiful people, not like me, Meera sighs. That is their hallmark. A deep rooted belief in their own ‘I am inviolable no matter what’. Giri must be pleased that we are here with the beautiful people of Bangalore. Giri will be even more pleased if one of our pictures makes it to Page three.Meera watches a tall svelte woman talk to a podgy man in a ponytail. Meera aches to be that woman, Aphrodite deigning to play knuckle bone with a goat. She knows who he is. Pan by the poolside, chasing his own echo. It would be nice to be pursued if only by a goat-legged Pan. But where nymphs roam, what place for the frowzy middle-aged Hera?
Nursed too well by the seasons, each seeking to feed her their libations, each wanting to fill her with their goodness, she, Meera Hera, earth goddess, corporate wife, will have to be content to loll amidst the aqua cushions of the poolside. Inconspicuous, quietly corpulent and on the pale side of neglected.The nymph tugs Pan’s ear, throws her head back and laughs. Meera sees the curve of her throat and unconsciously, she touches the underside of her own chin. When did this fold of flesh creep up on her?
Sunlight glints on the gold hoops in the woman’s ears. She is wearing a halter-necked blouse and capris. Meera looks at the expanse of lacquered skin and toned muscle and raises her eyes to the skies. ‘All I ask of you is upper arms like those!’
If she didn’t do something about hers, she would have bats’ wings very soon. Meera stifles a sigh and takes another sip. Plop. The weight lifts. Another knot of worry unravels. Tomorrow she will call Fitness One and make an appointment. Until then, plop, plop, plop.
.
A crow caws, its head tilted, its beady black eyes surveying the poolside world. Meera smiles at the crow. What is the crow seeing? Elephants knee deep in slush and still brooking no interference. Leopards on the prowl and hungry hyenas waiting. A bloat of hippopotami and gazelles at a water hole? Stately giraffes, a zeal of zebras and dumpy warthogs. A shoal of fish gliding. And yellow cabbage butterflies to whom flowers and animal urine exhale the same attraction. And all along a carpet of vultures scrutinize, ready to pounce. The animal planet Meera giggles.
A camera stares at her. Meera looks away, schooling her giggle into a demure smile. It wouldn’t do to be seen with her mouth slanting into a snigger, giving away her dissembling thoughts.Meera nibbles on a tartlet. I would have gone easy on the dill, she thinks. She longs for some more of the calamari rings. That they got right. Most restaurants turn calamari into rubber rings. But these were delicious. Just a hint of garlic and glistening with olive oil.
Meera sees the steward with the calamari at the farther side of the patio. She rises from the cane sofa. “Nikhil, I’ll be back in a little while,” she says. “Will you be alright?” she adds, a little uncertain.
She hadn’t wanted him here. “He’ll be bored, Giri. He is thirteen, for heaven’s sake. What will he do at a wine launch?”
But Giri had insisted. “It’s not a cocktail party. It’s a Sunday brunch. I am sure there will be other kids there. Probably a few from his class even. Besides, it’s time he got out and saw how real people live.”
Zeus spoke as he worked his way through the Sunday newspapers. Zeus, whose bidding even the heavenly bodies obeyed, would tolerate no interference. He made the laws. She, Meera Hera, listened. Or he would hurl that vicious thunderbolt of sullenness. Silence and quiet but determined pacing through the rooms, which frightened her more than any fanged words could.
“A poolside brunch and real people? You must be joking,” she had wanted to protest but she was afraid to shatter the fragile peace between them.
It seemed to her that they had done nothing but argue these past months. Hushed so no one else in the house knew that they were warring. Hissing accusations, deflected by cold mute anger. Spilling over emotion erased with composure. So she said nothing and coerced and finally bribed Nikhil into going with them.
She touches his elbow now when he doesn’t respond.
“What?” he asks, drawing his iPod earphones out.
“I need to circulate a bit. Would you like to eat something? Shall I fix you a tray? Some tartlets, a quiche slice, calamari rings?”
“Ugh! Do they have pizza?”
Meera shakes her head. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Then I don’t want anything.” He puts his earphones back and opens his book again.
Meera frowns. Either he ate all the wrong things or he starved. What is she to do with him? Hera had a son too. Python. What had she done with him?
She takes another sip. Plop.
The smell of sizzling meat wafts through the air. She looks around. There were only so many gods and goddesses and they are all here. People she recognizes from the society pages in the newspapers. People she knows. And some strangers. Even a maharaja, with an entourage of bodyguards and attendants. The sun catching the gems on the rings he wears as he reaches for one salted cashew nut after another from a bowl an attendant holds out to him. Eventually they would all meet and play out the upper epidermis of emotion. That is the nature of such parties. You network, with a drink in one hand and a smile on your face, clasping hands, air kissing, and all the while stewards tag you: mothers with trays of canapés, to tempt the errant wandering child.
Where is her Zeus by the way? She hasn’t seen Giri since they got here. Meera thinks again of Hera. How strange that the trajectories of their lives had followed almost the same path. Like Hera, she too had gathered a bedraggled cuckoo into her bosom. It had eaten and drunk its fill, nestled in her warmth and love, and now it wants her home. What is she to do? Be Hera who wised up to what Zeus in the disguise of that cuckoo wanted of her? Or allow herself to be manipulated like a guileless crow mother with a cuckoo child in its nest? Her head throbs suddenly. She can’t be drunk already.
Where is Giri? She thinks she sees the flash of a turquoise blue shirt. She hears his laugh emerge from a group of men. Meera smiles. The wind is Hera’s own. But it is only when Zeus smiles that Hera can puff the sails and winnow the fields. Or what use is the wind to Hera? Wives are the same everywhere. When Giri smiles, so does she. A wife in love. Meera Hera.She starts towards him, then pauses. She tugs the ruby teardrop clusters in her ear, runs her fingers through her hair and stands undecidedly. Should she go up to him or mingle with the others?
Giri doesn’t like it when she stays attached to his side. “We might as well stay at home then,” he had said once. “What’s the point of going out if you don’t socialize, meet a few new people? Circulate Meera, circulate. Chat. Introduce yourself if no one else will. Give them a sample of that famous Meera charm!”
Meera didn’t speak then either. She didn’t know if that last throwaway line tossed at her was a compliment or a barb.
Increasingly, with Giri, she never knows.Meera walks towards the barbecue. She would fix a plate for Nikhil. She knows exactly what he won’t be able to resist.
A diminutive woman with the snout of a shrew drifts towards them. “I hear the book is essential reading for every corporate wife these days,” the rodent says in greeting.
“Hey Meera,” a voice breathes in her ear. Meera turns abruptly. It is Akram Khan. A fashion photographer she knows rather well and likes immensely. She helped style a shoot for him once, a long time ago. She smiles and kisses three centimetres of air on either side of his face. And waits for him to do the same. Gods and goddesses seldom deviate from the rituals. “How are you?” she asks.
“Great! What about you? How’s the book doing?”
“Hello Lata,” Meera says, wishing she could cut her dead instead. Queen Lat. Mouse cunt. Meera bristles. The rodent was so patronizing in her review. She called Meera the Madhur Jaffrey of the boardroom. And here she is, continuing to patronize her.
Meera smiles as she does when fazed. A vague tremulous smile that gives nothing away but a benign sweetness. And Akram, reading Lata’s veiled insult as an accolade, beams, “That’s great news, Meera.”
Please don’t go, she pleads in her head as he shows signs of drifting off to another group.
What am I going to say to her when what I really want to do is bash her head and her little mouse snout in with my cast iron skillet. She takes another sip of the wine. Plop.
It doesn’t really matter. Mice will be mice. And a single Ms Mouse? Sneaky, furtive and almost laughable in its attempt to damage. The woman is just doing her job. And it seems to Meera, wife of Giri, queen of her world, mother of two, author of cookbooks, mentor of corporate wives and friend to the rich and celebrated, that she who has everything can afford to be forgiving. All the rodent has is an occasional book review. So Meera can afford to be generous. She gleams at the woman “I meant to call you and thank you for the review. You were so…” Meera gropes for a word, “… insightful in the way you approached the subject. Not everyone understands how demanding it is to be a corporate wife!”“Hello my dear,” a voice purrs in her ear. Meera swings around, a smile lighting up her eyes. It is Charlie Fernandez. He holds her firmly by her shoulders and kisses her resolutely on both cheeks. Meera doesn’t bother to hide her pleasure.
“So how’s my favourite cookbook writer?” Charlie says, loud enough for everyone around to hear. “I tried that Thai prawn recipe. It was just brilliant! Which idiot found fault with it?”
Meera sees the flicker of uncertainty in the rodent’s eyes. The small rodent’s small eyes. If she had whiskers, they would have twitched. Queen Lat, not so queenly any more. Everyone thinks of Charlie as the high priest of culture. His taste couldn’t be faulted. And the Thai prawn curry had come in for much criticism in the rodent’s review. Something to do with the coconut milk and how tiring it is to actually make it yourself, etc. Especially for women battling with sloppy home help.
Hasn’t the woman heard of coconut milk in tetrapaks? You snip the end with scissors and pour. Or there is coconut milk powder that you stir into water with a spoon and if a spoon is unavailable, the tip of a finger that will do. Can’t even the most harassed of cooks manage that? Meera fumed reading the review. Now seeing the rodent’s discomfort, Meera tries very hard to hide her glee. A glee that morphs into a confident voice as she cocks a finger at a steward.“Would you give this to the boy sitting there?” she says thrusting a plate of barbecue into the steward’s hands and gesturing to Nikhil. “And oh, do give him a glass of Coke.”
“More wine, ma’am?” Another steward stands at her elbow.
“I shouldn’t. This is my second glass and it isn’t even noon yet,” Meera dithers.
“Go on, you are a big girl,” Charlie urges. And then: “Oh, look what’s come in through the door,” he murmurs.
Meera sees a well-known society hostess and dancer sweep in.
“What a number! There was a time when she was doing so many openings, cutting so many satin ribbons tied across doorways, that Deepak called her Edward Scissorhands in one of his columns. She doesn’t talk to him any more.”
Meera giggles.
Suddenly Meera realizes she is having a splendid time. These are all her friends. And this is the life she so wanted. Meera knows for certain that there is nowhere else she would rather be.The afternoon wears on. Meera forgets to count the number of glasses. She sits by the pool letting the water lick at her feet. She has an anklet on. Her daughter has the other one. Her grown-up daughter leading a very grown-up life in another city.
What will he say if I tell him that I have a nineteen-year-old daughter? A tall girl with skin like porcelain and grey-green eyes, studying at the Indian Institute of Technology. She looks at the handsome aspiring actor who sits by her side with his feet in the water. He has his trousers rolled up far enough for her to see the hair that covers his legs. Mia macho. Mia maxima macho….
Zeus, are you looking my way? Meera throws a glance over her shoulder. Do you see him, this Adonis, with a doric column for a throat and a damp well at the base? Where locusts feed, so can I, Giri, so can I.Meera smiles honey at the actor even as he speaks the most inane rubbish; he wants, among other things, a chessboard patterned floor and to write a book about his childhood spent in a small town. Why is it, Meera asks herself suppressing a yawn, that everyone wants to write a book about their suburban childhoods? Long bicycle rides, skinning mango trees, cricket matches and other wholesome things – why not one about trawling the alleys of a city, strangling cats and smashing car windows?
But every now and then Meera sees him dart a glance at her ankles and feels his eyes on her lips. When he reaches across and touches the tip of her nose, she wonders if she should say something. She knows what Giri will accuse him of when they get home. “He just wants to fuck you. Guys like him have only one thing on their minds. I know. I know how men think!”Meera thrusts the thought away and puts on her everything-you-say-is-the-most-interesting-thing-I’ve-ever-heard-in-my-life face and focuses on the actor.
“You are so …” the actor begins.
“Charming? Sexy?” Meera giggles.
“I was going to say easy to talk to. That I feel a great connection with you. But yes, you are charming and sexy too!” the actor whispers huskily.
Someone must have told him that his voice has a sexy timbre when lowered. What an ass! I ought to shut up and not encourage him. I am drunk, Meera thinks, and searches the poolside for Giri. Where is he? She wants to go home and lie down.Just then Nikhil comes to her side. “Mom, I can’t find Dad!”
“He’ll be here somewhere.”
“No, he’s not. I checked the men’s room. And the parking lot too. His car’s not there either.”Meera rises abruptly. She thrusts the plate and glass into the actor’s hands and looks around. “He should be here somewhere,” she says again, wandering back towards the seating area.
“Are you looking for Giri?” Charlie asks from near the bar.
“Yes, have you seen him, Charlie?” She tries to hide the worry in her voice. She sees Queen Lat’s eyes glitter. The speculation.
“He stepped out as I was coming in. That was about two hours ago, Meera.”That is when Meera feels her perfect September day with its blue sky acquire an underbelly of grey.
A wail gathers in her. But she clamps it down and improvises, “How silly of me? The flight must be early….”
The words trail away. Meera sees the knowing look in the faces around her.My Giri is not Zeus. He does not frolic with nymphets or even goddesses. He is prone to fits of rage; he is ambitious. But he is eminently trustworthy.
Meera hears again that censorious voice in her head: That’s exactly what Hera must have thought each time Zeus disappeared from her horizon!
The horizon is darkening. A steely cast settles on the blue skies of the afternoon. There is none of the oppressive heat that announces the arrival of the rains in June. Instead, thunder rumbles from deep within the massing greyness. From the corner of his eye, Jak sees the woman shiver and pull the ends of her stole closer together. He frowns. It isn’t all that cold in the little tinbox that is his car. He glances at his watch. It is half past three. “Hmm... the monsoon will soon be here,” He says, filling the silence in the car.
The woman and the boy are quiet. Their stillness fills him with unease. If the goddamn car had a radio, he would switch it on. Anything to dispel the pall of mourning. Their colourless faces match the leaves of the trees they pass, an ashen sheen that seems to have taken on the reflection of the grim skies.
He waits for one of them to speak. When they don’t, he continues.
“I love the rains. I think I missed it more than anything else while I was away. That pure loamy earth scent after the first rain. It’s funny how we miss these little things more than the really important ones. Did I mention to you that I used to live in the US until I relocated to Bangalore… oh, do you call it Bangaluru?”
Meera shakes her head, “Hardly anyone does except announcers at airports and railway stations. And politicians perhaps. It will always be Bangalore for me.”
“Like Chennai will always be Madras for me.”
A scream rents the car. He brakes abruptly.“It’s your phone! It’s your phone!” a tinny voice screams.
The boy pulls the phone out of one of his numerous pockets and shuts it off. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. Then he grins, unable to hide his glee at the shock his ring tone had caused.
Jak tries to grin back, but his heart is thudding. Idiot boy, he thinks.
The woman looks as if she is going to burst into tears. “Nikhil,” she hisses. “Didn’t I tell you to change that ring tone?”
“I’m sorry,” the boy says. “I meant to. I forgot.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “But I must confess that for a moment it scared the shi…” He stops abruptly, conscious of what he was about to say, and clears his throat. “I was petrified.”
He looks at the woman and boy.He had gone to the brunch on a whim. He knew hardly anyone there. But Sheela, who was a director of the PR firm that was organizing the brunch, was an old friend and she had been very persuasive. “I need you. I need some new faces in the pictures. It’s almost a joke… whether it’s a wine launch or a book event, the same people are everywhere. Credibility is becoming an issue, so you, Kitcha, can be the credibility man. The new kid on the block. I love that combination of grey at the temples and the designer stubble. And all those bracelets, the diamond stud and the cigar. Epitome of cool! Professor JAK, visiting from the US, etc.! Also, how else will you meet people in the city? Come on, just for an hour or so.”
He shook his head in amusement. Epitome of cool indeed! She’d say anything to drag him to her wine event. He didn’t bother too much about his appearance settling for comfort in clothes rather than elegance. He was a tall man, six feet two in his socks, and his broad shoulders made him look fitter than he was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, he would often pinch with a sigh the roll of flesh around his middle. He was a man going to fat, he told himself as he angled the mirror this way and that, quite aware in a detached way that he would do nothing about it.
He didn’t mind growing old and didn’t particularly seek ways to hide the toll of age. No dyeing the grey in his hair or styling it in such a way as to disguise the receding hairline. He didn’t gym or diet. Sometimes when he was truly restless, he went for a run or a swim. That was it. So when women found him attractive, he wondered why. In his mind, he was still the lanky awkward boy he once was, unable to figure out what to do with his arms and legs. In time, he had learnt to accept the female attention with an easy regard. He didn’t go looking for it but he didn’t disdain it either when it came his way.
Sheela had known him when he was Kitcha. She still called him Kitcha and not Jak as everyone else did. It did something to him to hear himself being called by his boyhood name. She must sense how starved I am for companionship, he thought. No, the word was diversion. His life had fallen into a rut and he was not given to staying in one place for too long. Yet, here he was, bound to Bangalore for the last seven months and there was no telling when he would ever be able to shake the dust off his feet.
He had smiled again at Sheela’s description and leaned forward to light her cigarette.
And he went. He drank a few glasses of wine. Stayed on the fringes of groups and out of arguments and was wondering if he could leave without offending Sheela, when she asked him if he could offer a lift back to the woman and boy - “If it isn’t a bother, that is? They live in the same part of town as you do. The husband had to leave suddenly and they are stranded.”
So here they were, in his car. The woman was supposed to be a cookbook writer. A gracious woman, but quiet. He wondered what had happened for the husband to leave so abruptly. Did they quarrel? He hadn’t noticed any unpleasantness. Or, maybe it had happened before he reached there.
In the rear-view mirror he glimpses the boy: bewilderment and hope jostling in a child’s face, waiting for things to right themselves. In the presence of the thirteen-year-old with his nose pressed to the glass, he knows a stilling of time.
I was that boy, he thinks.Bright thirteen-year-old Kitcha, unsullied by adult troubles, who thought every mango worth a shy, every shell a conch with the sea’s song trapped in it, and every blank page waiting to be turned into a picture of his making.
Kitcha who couldn’t fathom the hunted look in his father’s eyes and puzzled at what could frighten an adult. Kitcha had a history teacher waiting to pounce on him, but whose relentless scrutiny did Appa fear?
Kitcha had watched his regal mother two inches taller than Appa and with the wide shoulders, that she bequeathed to him, crouch into a whimpering huddle the day his father made known his decision to join the ashram. To renounce the world. Their world.His father no longer cowered and all his twitches had ironed themselves out. Appa was no longer his appa, and all he would say was, “The time has come!”
His mother raised herself on an elbow. “Whose time are you talking of? Yours or mine? Do you understand what you are condemning me to? Has it occurred to you even once? Tell me, what did I do wrong? Tell me, what was my fault?”
Appa shook his head dismissively. “It is not what you think. You are not to blame. If someone is to be blamed, it is me for being such a coward. I should have told you. My parents knew I never wished for any of this. A wife, a child, the murkiness of grihastha ashrama ….
It was my duty to provide them with an heir, they said. For the family line to continue. Don’t forget who we are, they said. Who are we? I wanted to demand. The Hoysalas or the Cholas, for all this talk of an heir? But I couldn’t hurt them. So I was obliged to shelve my desire.
So you happened. And then Kitcha. Their heir. But I discovered that you had me wrapped in your coils.”
.
For a moment Kitcha thought he saw hatred in his father’s eyes. How could his father look at his mother like that? Then he heard his father say, “I told myself I would wait until Kitcha’s brahmoupadesham. Once his upanayanam was conducted, I thought I could leave. I was such a fool! ”
Kitcha rolled between his thumb and forefinger the sacred thread. Was this already yellowing slender thread, testimony to his brahminical destiny, the cause of all this trouble? If he hadn’t had his Upanayanam, would Appa have had to stay on?
“But then I couldn’t go. I wished to see him, be with him, hear his chatter and his laughter. I still couldn’t sever the ties. But now the time has come. None of this,” Appa flung his arm out in a gesture that encompassed everything – Kitcha, who sat with a sketch pad and box of Camlin watercolour tubes and two brushes in a glass of water, his weeping mother, the long bare hall with a swing, the veena propped in the corner, the old clock on the wall, and the sofa-cum-bed that Kitcha had opened out in the night and slept on. “None of this means anything any more. I see all of it as bandhanam. Bonds. Shackles. I am suffocating!”
Appa had turned to him. He had raised his hand as if to gather him into an embrace, then dropped it abruptly. Kitcha thought, was he a bandhanam too? How could Appa have turned himself into this cold stranger?
Kitcha’s mother Sarada Ammal, the perfect wife who observed every auspicious date and ritual, who braided jasmine for the evening puja and played the veena, who on Janmasthami laid a trail of footprints through the house and lit a hundred and one lamps on Karthika Vilakku, lay on her side muttering, “For fourteen years, I never ever disagreed with you. Your will was mine. And now, you call me a chain tying you down. How can you? What am I to do now? What do I do now?”
When Appa spoke next, he addressed only Kitcha. It was as if he had already erased the presence of Sarada from his life. “One day, Kitcha, you too will know it. A moment of truth and then everything else will cease to be of any significance. Everything else will only seem a deterrent then. An irritant standing between you and your goal.”
Kitcha wondered if Appa was possessed. He was using words he didn’t understand. What Appa said made no sense. Yet, there was a ring of certainty in his voice.
And Kitcha felt torn. Admiration for a father who already seemed to have turned into a demigod and anguish for his mother whom he had never seen so desolate or broken.Kitcha ran then. He threw aside his paints and brushes, crumpled the painting into a messy wet splodge of paper and ran to the slatternly Marina with its side shows of the two-headed woman and the monster child, the horse, and camel rides, the vendors and other strays like him. To the swell and plish plash of waves against the shore.
He stared at the sea, counting the waves. He saw the sea wash away the debris and the words he wrote on the sea. Fuck you Appa, he wrote. Fuck you. Arsehole. Jerk. Motherfucker. Bastard. He wrote all the words he had found in the Harold Robbins novels he borrowed from the lending library. A calm settled on him.
He leaned into the cold gritty brush of the wave and learned in its touch an infinite sense of hope. The wave. It came. It went. It came. It went. It came. It went. Nothing changed that. Perhaps his world too would right itself again. When he reached home, his horizon would be the one he has always known: Appa with the shortwave radio pressed to his ear, as if by osmosis he could make the world of BBC and VOA his own. And Amma? She would be picking bits of husk and grit from the rice lunch. She would look up from the plate and frown. Even before he had crossed the threshold, she would rage and rant at him for having run away. And Appa would rush to his defence. “Let the boy be, Sarada. He won’t do it again, Will you Kitcha?”Nothing had changed when he reached home in the evening, grimy, wind tossed, hungry and tired. He discovered a mother who lay stone faced and a father gone.
“What do I do now?” his mother asked the silent rooms of their home. “They tell me I ought to feel blessed to have been married to a man who has taken up sanyas. I am cursed, Kitcha, that’s what I am. Neither a wife nor a widow. Who am I, Kitcha? You tell me. He says – it’s not you. That’s what I can’t bear. If he left me for another woman, I would woo him back. I would bring him back to us. But this! How do I fight this, Kitcha?”
Kitcha didn’t know what to say. He was embarrassed by this needy woman who lay on her side tracing circles on the cement floor with her index finger. Some of what she said he understood and the rest was a mystery, like his father’s decision to go away. Besides, how did one console a mother? I don’t know, I don’t know, he whispered. I am as lost as you are, he thought.It is Kitcha the boy who sneaks a look at the woman’s face. He wants to speak words of consolation to her and the boy. “Maybe he has just gone for a drive. I’ve done it myself. Several times. When I have worked the demons out, I go home. I don’t think you should worry. Really!”
But it is Jak who speaks. Urbane, suave Jak with his vestibule brand of chit chat. “Sheela said you are a fantastic chef. And that you have authored cookbooks. You should give me a few recipes. Something that’s really easy to make,” he says.
Perhaps it’s best to not get involved. Meera, he remembers. That is her name. He thinks suddenly of the Meera bhajans his mother took to singing in those first fallow years after Appa left. His mother found in Meera a soul sister. Another woman languishing in a manic unreciprocated love. Another woman wedded to an image.
Jak shivers. He doesn’t want to dwell on the past. In fact, he doesn’t want to have to dwell on anything.
Besides, he wants to forget about the scream. It had disturbed him more than he realized. But even as he pulls away from the lilac house, it echoes in his head. reminding him of the screams that sometimes emerges from Smriti.
Which one of the fates had hovered as he named his child thus? For that was all there was to her now. What is remembered…
His fingers clench the steering wheel as though he means to hurt it, and feels the tightness in his chest again.
- - - - - -
Anita Nair is the best-selling author of three novels, The Better Man, Ladies Coupe and Mistress and a collection of literary essays, Goodnight and God Bless. Mistress was long-listed for the 2008 Orange Prize in the UK. It was also a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award in the USA and for the LiBeratupreis 2007 in Germany. Anita’s books have been translated into thirty languages around the world. She lives in Bangalore. Visit her at www.anitanair.net
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